Gadgets: The Mobile Web; People can guess Web-site names like google.mobi without their phone's crashing from too many pop-ups.(dot-mobi)

Byline: Emily Flynn Vencat

Remember how small the Internet of the early 1990s was? CompuServe, America Online and some other private, for-profit firms charged content owners rent for virtual space and banked membership fees from users for access to their content. Then Web browsers made the entire Internet available to the average person. If you happen to be surfing on a mobile device, however, your experience is more akin to that of the dark ages of the 1990s. Because the typical Web page doesn't fit legibly on a tiny cell-phone screen, people wanting access to the mobile Net have to go through so-called walled garden servers like Vodafone Live and iMode.

Now some high-tech firms are trying to promote a standardized domain name for mobile devices--similar to dot-com for Web sites--that would give users a reliable way of receiving and displaying data on their mobile devices. In June, Microsoft, Google, Nokia, Vodafone and other firms announced dot-mobi--a domain-name suffix for mobile users--that is supposed to create a standardized, recognizable way for companies to launch mobile-friendly sites to mirror their existing sites. The venture could remove a big impediment to making mobile Internet a widespread--and perhaps even a preferred--mode of ...